Samba
Contents
Samba is a system that runs on non-Windows platorms to provide file and
print services to Windows clients. Here in Structural Biology, we run
Samba on a Linux server to offer our
Windows users easy access to centralized storage space that is protected
by mirrored disk drives and our standard UNIX backup regimen.
To request a Samba account, send an email to the
SBIT
administrators and we will create your Samba account for you.
You can easily access your Samba share from your Windows PC, transparently storing/retrieving files.
-
Open an Explorer window by either:
double clicking the "My Computer" icon on the desktop
or by opening the start menu and clicking on the "My Computer" icon there.
-
Select "Map Network Drive" from the "Tools" menu:
-
A connection dialog will appear:
Select the drive letter you wish to use
(or leave it as the default) and in the text field labelled "Folder:" enter:
\\128.210.48.102\username
where username is your login name.
If this is a laptop make sure that the "Reconnect at logon" box is unchecked.
Otherwise you may experience long start up times when using your laptop PC at home.
-
Click on the "different user name" link and enter your login information in the box
provided:
Click "Ok" and you will be connected to your Structural Biology Samba drive
-
In order to avoid having to do this each time you login to your PC, create a shortcut
from the mapped network drive to your desktop. After you have mapped the network drive,
a network drive icon will appear in the "My Computer" window:
Right click on this icon and select "Create Shortcut":
A window will pop up saying "Windows cannot create a shortcut here. Do you want the
shortcut to be placed on the desktop instead?" - click "Yes".
You can now rename the shortcut icon on your desktop something like "Structure Drive".
You will now be able to access the Samba share by simply double clicking the shortcut on
your desktop.
You may access your Samba share from our UNIX systems either through NFS
or one of the secure shell commands (ssh, scp, sftp). Here's how to access Samba
from NFS (substituting your login name for username):
gimli:~> cd /bio/samba/username
Here's an example of using
scp to copy a file from the Samba server to the local current directory.
gimli:~> scp samba:/samba/username/thesis.doc .
It's common in Windows to have file names which contain embedded spaces. This requires
some special handling when using UNIX commands. Notice the use of double quotes (")
and the backslash character (\) in the following example. Double quotes
must surround the entire path and each embedded space must be preceded by a
backslash.
gimli:~> scp samba:"/samba/username/My\ Documents/thesis.doc" .
If you'd like to use the KDE desktop filemanager to access your Samba drive:
-
Open up the filemanager (Konqueror) by clicking the
icon on your screen.
-
In the "Location:" field, enter:
smb://samba.bio.purdue.edu/username
Where username
is your login name.
-
An "Authorization Dialog" window will appear. Enter your login name and password and click "OK".
-
You may now bookmark the connection for easy access.
-
From the Finder menu, click Go and then "Connect to Server..."
-
In the field labelled "Server Address:" enter:
smb://samba.bio.purdue.edu/username
Where username is your login name.
-
Click the "Connect" button. You will then be presented with a "SMB/CIFS Filesystem Authentication" window.
Enter your username and password and click "Ok".
-
A window will appear displaying the contents of your Samba drive:
If you would like to disconnect the drive, simply drag the associated icon on the desktop into the Trash.
